


Achilles and Patroclus

by Mephistophelia



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Also not exactly not-smut, Angst, Canon Era, Canonical Character Death, Casual Pining, E is probs on the ace spectrum somewhere, M/M, Not exactly smut, Relationship Study, gratuitous Greek allusions because of who I am as a person, yikes boys this is not a healthy relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-28
Updated: 2018-04-07
Packaged: 2019-04-14 01:59:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14125662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mephistophelia/pseuds/Mephistophelia
Summary: Four summers. It wasn't, for Grantaire, nearly enough time together. But it was all they had, and Grantaire wouldn't trade it for anything.Or: three times R thought Enjolras was ashamed of him, and one time he wasn't so sure.





	1. Apollo

**Author's Note:**

> Things I learned writing this fic:
> 
> 1\. Enjolras is in many ways a garbage person.
> 
> 2\. I will love that aloof, emotionally repressed little Robespierre until the end of my days.
> 
> Anyway, here are four chapters of wildly dysfunctional E/R, in which I decide that there's no such thing as a bad time to make a reference to Greek mythology.

_June 1829_

Grantaire strolls into the Corinthe shortly before seven in the evening, his sketchbook under one arm. It’s early yet, for supper or for drinking, but the notion of being home that night repulses him. Not on a June evening like this, when the sun lingers in the sky as long as it dares, gilding the dome of the Pantheon, making the cobbled streets run gold between the stones.

When Grantaire moved to Paris at twenty, he thought he would loathe it. Now, at twenty-three, the city has grown on him. It lives within him now. He feels the grit, the slime, the rushing blood of Paris loud in his ears, tastes it sharp on his tongue. He loves it. Paris, among other things, has taught him how fiercely he can love.

He glances around the second floor of the wineshop, searching for an empty table, one near the window, for the light. Then he spots a surprise.

Combeferre, a new friend he has met in a dull course on religious theory, sits at Grantaire’s ideal table near the window. His dark hair is mussed, as though he’s run a frustrated hand through it more than once. He bends over a book, scowling at the words. This isn’t the surprise. Combeferre has nothing to do with it.

The surprise is the man sitting next to Combeferre.

The man underlines a sentence with his finger, angling his body toward Combeferre, speaking without animation but with passion. Grantaire has never seen this man before. Of that, he’s utterly certain. Grantaire would remember seeing a man like this. Even from a distance, he’s unquestionably the most beautiful man Grantaire has ever seen.

And Grantaire makes a habit of seeing handsome men, as many as will see him. Another thing he’s come to love about Paris: more freedom to love the way he likes, so long as he’s subtle about it. He’s had plenty of men, intends to have more. But he’s never wanted one so badly as he wants this.

Slender and elegant, utterly in control of his own body, the man is so handsome he seems to glow. His golden hair would curl if it were long enough to, which it isn’t. His blue eyes are fine and sharp, and his nose is delicate, which seems charmingly at odds with the rest of his profile. Grantaire is a painter, he studies art like other men breathe, and he’s never seen a painted angel more full of the proof of God than this stranger in the Corinthe.

He wants to fall to his knees and pray—for the man, about him, to him? Who can say? Instead, he crosses the room and takes the last empty seat at their table.

Both Combeferre and the god look up. Combeferre smiles. The god doesn’t.

“Mind?” Grantaire says, gesturing from the window to his sketchbook. “The light.”

“When have you ever cared if I mind?” Combeferre asks.

Grantaire smiles. “Come now,” he says. “You’ll give your friend the wrong idea of me.”

Combeferre rolls his eyes. If he senses what Grantaire’s angling at, he chooses to ignore it. “R, this is Enjolras,” he says. “New to the Sorbonne. Enjolras, Grantaire. An idiot.”

Grantaire kicks Combeferre viciously under the table. Combeferre bears it like a stoic.

“Pleasure,” Enjolras says. “They call you R?”

Grantaire nods. “Grand R. It’s a…er. It’s a pun.”

It sounds unforgivably stupid, saying this out loud.

Enjolras nods, thin-lipped. He isn’t, Grantaire gathers, a man who enjoys puns.

“Are you new to Paris?” Grantaire asks, hoping to steer the conversation toward a topic that isn’t himself.

Enjolras nods. “From the south,” he says. “Avignon.”

“Pontifical,” Grantaire observes.

Enjolras cocks an eyebrow. “I suppose.”

Grantaire wishes for death. He’s making conversation about medieval popes. God help him, he thought he knew how to flirt. Is there a more pathetic man on the surface of the earth? He doubts it.

Combeferre sighs. “Enjolras and I and Courfeyrac,” he says, “we’re arranging a sort of meeting later this week.”

Grantaire could kiss Combeferre in gratitude for saving the conversation. Though he’s already tried kissing Combeferre once before, after a great deal too much brandy. He left the encounter with a black eye and the vibrant conclusion that he ought not to try again.

“Meeting for what?” Grantaire asks.

“To organize,” Enjolras says.

Grantaire blinks. For a moment, he is utterly certain Enjolras and Combeferre have invited him to alphabetize a bookshelf.

“Politically,” Enjolras clarifies. The word seems to animate him from within, like God breathing life into the lungs of a clay man. He speaks with his hands now. “Against the royalists and the Bonapartists. For social reform, an end to colonial expansion, living wages for honest work, human dignity.”

Grantaire believes nothing Enjolras is saying. None of it’s possible. It’s all ludicrous idealism, dreamed up by a child who’s never had to work a day in his life. The only men who survive in Paris are those who take what they’re given and scrap for the rest. Only a handsome rich boy like Enjolras would ever be fooled into thinking otherwise.

Grantaire doesn’t believe Enjolras for a moment. But it thrills him, to hear Enjolras say these things Grantaire doesn’t believe.

“Not a small list of goals, for one summer,” Grantaire observes.

Enjolras rolls his eyes. His disdain, it seems, doesn’t need long to take root. “We’ll meet weekly at the Café Musain,” he says. “Eight. Rue Saint-Michel.”

“I know the place,” Grantaire says.

“You might come,” Enjolras says. “If you liked.” He seems violently indifferent to the prospect.

“I might, I might not,” Grantaire says, knowing already he will.

 

* * *

 

The Musain is already quite full by the time Grantaire arrives. Combeferre, it seems, recruited a quarter of the Sorbonne to show up—or perhaps that was Courfeyrac, who is earnest and enthusiastic enough that no one can say no to him about anything. Grantaire recognizes a smattering of faces, from class and from his other Parisian haunts. Working men and students, most shabbily dressed, all speaking animatedly. Grantaire spots the bald head of Bossuet at a table and takes the empty chair beside him. He leans over and swipes Bossuet’s wineglass, taking an uninvited mouthful. Bossuet doesn’t even bother to protest.

“I didn’t know you had political opinions,” Bossuet said mildly.

Grantaire grins. “I don’t,” he says. “I came to see if they’re contagious.”

In a few minutes, the group is called to order. Combeferre hops up onto the table, swaying slightly before Courfeyrac reaches up to steady him with a hand to the hip. He glances down, smiles ruefully in thanks, then addresses the group. His speech is straightforward, bold, confident. He calls the first meeting at the Cafe Musain to order, and the room immediately feels in good hands.

Then Courfeyrac, who Grantaire only knows from a few chance meetings, but immediately wants to know better. The man is a storm of energy coalesced into human form. His waistcoat is as daring as his rhetoric. He speaks too quickly, gestures too broadly, laughs too often. Every professional orator would disdain his technique. And yet he is impossibly charming, worming his way directly into each of his listeners’ hearts.

And then he steps down from the table, and Enjolras takes his place.

Though he’s not a tall man, his sheer command of the room makes him seem taller than both of them. He doesn’t seem to have dressed for the occasion, as Courfeyrac did. Enjolras wears a simple green waistcoat and narrowly tailored black trousers that have seen better days. (Though, Grantaire admits, he cannot fault the tailoring.) His clothes are well-made, but well-worn. Grantaire can’t decide what to make of this, if Enjolras comes from a wealthy family fallen on hard times, or if he simply can’t be bothered to think of ordinary things like clothes. Both, Grantaire supposes, are possible.

In any case, Grantaire doesn’t have long to muse on this. Enjolras squares his shoulders and fixes his eyes on the crowd. He isn’t smiling. He seems to glow from within as he speaks.

And how he speaks.

Of the rights of man, the glorious potential of their nation. He speaks of the poor with an intimacy Grantaire has never seen from a rich boy like this. Of the factory-workers and the day-laborers, the beggars and the homeless, prostitutes and thieves and immigrants from the colonies as though he’s met and known them all. There’s no disgust in his voice, only exaltation. His words cloak Paris in gold, and every citizen glimmers.

He speaks of revolution, and while Grantaire knows that revolution is a fool’s hope, he also knows that he will die for this man’s vision, if it’s asked of him.

Grantaire can’t decide if he wants to kiss Enjolras’ lips or his feet, to proposition him or prostrate himself before him. He has never felt smaller, more filthy, more unworthy. He feels pathetic. He feels, somehow, at the same time, holy.

When Enjolras finishes, the Musain erupts. Grantaire is breathless. His own emotion feels foreign to him, and vaguely irritating. He didn’t give his heart permission to transform him into an idiot. God, he’s seen beautiful men before, why can’t he _control_ himself?

Bossuet whistles, long and low. “Quite a voice on that fellow,” he says.

Grantaire nods.

“Quite an ass, too,” Bossuet adds with a wink.

Grantaire blushes scarlet. Was it that obvious he was looking? “Bossuet, _Christ_.”

After the meeting, Grantaire stands and approaches Enjolras, with hesitancy that feels uncomfortable but necessary. He can’t approach Enjolras like he would a normal person. He’s unworthy of that. Instead he hovers, awkwardly, three feet away. Enjolras is packing papers into his satchel, and barely notices him.

“You were brilliant,” Grantaire says.

Enjolras looks up. His blue eyes are unreadable. “Thank you.”

“I mean to say,” Grantaire says, feeling the heat rise in his face again, “for those who like that sort of thing.”

“Do you?”

The speech has emboldened Grantaire. A revolution of the soul, or something like. He has nothing to lose—or rather, everything to lose, and a sudden lack of fear about losing it. With daring he barely recognizes in himself, he lets one hand skim Enjolras’ shoulder, momentary but unmistakable. He plays the gesture off, as if brushing aside a piece of dust, a feather, from the man’s waistcoat. Enjolras does not lean into the touch. Nor does he pull back.

“Yes,” Grantaire says. “I do like that sort of thing.”

Enjolras cocks his head to the side. Grantaire retracts his hand.

“I’ll remember that,” Enjolras says, and he follows Combeferre into the night.

The stars seem to bathe him as he passes through the doorway, silver wiping out the traces of gold. Grantaire watches him long after he is out of sight.

 

* * *

 

Alone in his room that night, Grantaire sets aside the sketch he has been unable to finish for the past four nights and turns to a blank page instead. It seems like too much effort to pull his desk into the patch of moonlight falling from the window, so he sits on the floor instead, his sketchbook propped against his thighs.

It’s terrible light to work by. His childhood drawing-master would have torn out his beard at the thought of his prize student trying to draw by moonlight and the stubs of three candles. Of course, the drawing-master would have been scandalized for more reasons than that. A half-empty bottle of brandy sits at Grantaire’s feet, faithful as a spaniel. It’s waiting for him, for when his sketches start to fall apart and he doubts all his skills as an artist, when nothing but the bottom of a bottle seems likely to comfort him.

He doesn’t need it yet.

The sketch comes to life quickly across the page. A man’s figure. Nothing unusual in that, for a choice of subject. Grantaire has always been a portraitist, despite his tutors’ fervent efforts to broaden his skills. And this figure is one that begs to be captured on paper. A strong, elegant form, lean as a panther, done in definite lines and confident strokes. Though abstract, almost inhuman, the drawing is beautiful. This isn’t arrogance on Grantaire’s part. The beauty simply _is._ The figure stands on a table, and proud wings billow sail-like from his shoulders to frame the window behind him. Proudly feathered, white and gold and black, spread eagle-wide.

A god, he thinks.

Drawn by a pathetic, subhuman drunk, he remembers.

Ugly, useless, stupid, cynical, no one, nothing.

How did he dare to speak to that man? And not just speak to him, but insinuate. _If you like that sort of thing._ Worse than stupid. Deluded. He isn’t worth looking at, let alone speaking to. Let alone loving.

With a wordless snarl, Grantaire tears the page from his sketchbook and crumples it between his hands. He sees the last point of a feather disappear between his fists, and then he tosses the page across the room. It strikes the opposite wall with a soft _thwack_ before bouncing against the floor.

“Fuck it,” Grantaire says to the empty room.

He fumbles until his hand closes on the bottle beside him. The brandy burns on the way down, but that’s all right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and kudos make my life, friends.


	2. Aphrodite

June 1830

Tonight’s meeting runs long, but then, these meetings always do. After a year of assembling in the back room of the Musain, the newly named Amis de l’ABC no longer hold to antiquated, bourgeois notions like agendas. The three fearless leaders—Enjolras, Combeferre, and Courfeyrac—give loose estimates as to duration, guesses that are immediately shattered the moment debate gets underway. Tonight, it’s past eleven, and the argument is just at long last beginning to die.

Courfeyrac’s decision to invite the young Bonapartist Marius Pontmercy to the meeting may have been unwise, Grantaire muses. It is, however, entertaining, to watch Marius square off against Enjolras. He still suspects that Enjolras might punch the boy in the face.

Grantaire watches from the corner of the room, slouched in his chair, bottle of brandy in one hand. He has nothing to contribute to the argument—can’t fathom, frankly, how two men aged twenty can have such strong opinions about the taxation of sugarcane from Martinique—but he’s more than content to watch.

Enjolras, after all, is enthralling when he’s angry.

Other people raise their voices when they fight. Enjolras raises his diction. In the past ten minutes, he’s used more six-syllable words than Grantaire has heard in his entire life combined. Enjolras’ clear eyes flash, and his hands underline each point with savagely economical gestures. He can keep this up, Grantaire knows, until sunrise. If it’s a question of endurance, no debater can best Enjolras.

Joly’s pocketwatch proclaims it ten past eleven when Madame Hucheloup storms into the room, brandishing a tea towel like a whip.

“Out!” she shouts.

Enjolras and Marius both freeze, still glaring at one another. Marius has one hand raised toward the ceiling in indignation, and seems to have forgotten about it.

“You’ve been shouting for _four hours_.” Madame snaps the tea towel toward Marius, who sidesteps it. “And you’re frightening away my customers.”

“Do you have other customers?” Grantaire asks wryly.

“Not anymore, thanks to you,” Madame snaps. “Out.”

Courfeyrac bows low, gracing the proprietress with his most winning smile. “Our sincere apologies, Madame,” he says sweetly. “My friends and I would hate to inconvenience you. Come on, boys. Let the worthy woman go to bed.”

Madame turns brilliantly pink and leaves the room, muttering something about young men being too charming for their own good.

The group fades slowly into the night, in twos and threes. Marius forgot the debate the moment he stopped speaking, and chats with Courfeyrac about a pretty young barmaid as they spill out into the evening. Joly and Bossuet trade rude jokes—something about a nun and a Burmese python, Grantaire lacks the context but catches the innuendo. Combeferre glances back at Enjolras, as if to ask whether he is also on his way out, before shrugging and tagging along with Bahorel and Jehan, who slow their pace to let him.

Soon, no one remains in the Musain but Enjolras, leaning against the window with his head against the pane, and Grantaire, still sitting in the corner, still watching him.

Enjolras shows no sign of leaving. Grantaire cannot fathom why.

“Congratulations,” Grantaire says, more to fill the silence than anything. “Another fatal blow to Bonaparte.”

Enjolras shakes his head and crosses his arms. “Marius wasn’t convinced,” he says wearily. It is the closest Grantaire has ever heard him come to admitting defeat.

It is the closest they have ever come to having a serious conversation. He will not let this opportunity go, no matter what it costs him.

“By you? Apollo, the great and terrible? Napoleon himself would be convinced.”

“I’ve told you not to call me that,” Enjolras says.

He has. Many times. And as many times, Grantaire has ignored it. Irritation is not quite the emotion he yearns to inspire in Enjolras, but it’s the only one he feels completely worthy of.

“Are you composing other arguments to slay Marius with tomorrow night?” Grantaire jokes, still not moving from his slouch. “Or are you waiting for me to take you home?”

Enjolras pauses. He almost seems uncomfortable. The blood rushes to Grantaire’s face, and for a moment he is mortified, certain he overstepped. Then Enjolras pushes himself off the wall and reaches for his jacket, sliding it on over his shoulders with effortless, almost ludicrous grace.

“If you don’t have anything else to do,” he says.

Grantaire blinks. He meant it as a joke.

Didn’t he?

“That is, if you’re interested,” Enjolras says. He doesn’t seem to take offense at the idea that Grantaire might not be interested. It seems utterly the same to him, one way or the other. “But when you said you liked ‘that sort of thing,’ I thought you meant, well. With me.”

Grantaire’s mouth is hanging open like a goldfish. He forces himself to close it.

“Yes,” he says—how did Enjolras remember that, it was a _year ago_ , he had been _joking_. “Yes, that’s what I meant. I didn’t know you were…”

“Now you know,” Enjolras says coolly.

The tips of Grantaire’s fingers feel cold. He assumes it’s because all the blood in his body has rushed straight to his face. “Well then,” he says stupidly. “Then, I’m…I’m quite interested.”

Someone, he thinks, ought to submit that sentence to the Académie Française as the definition of understatement.

“Good,” Enjolras says.

Grantaire nods. “All right,” he says.

“So,” Enjolras says, after a moment.

Grantaire is still nodding. “Yes.”

A pause.

“I don’t know where you live,” Enjolras says pointedly.

Grantaire wonders whether he will actually die of embarrassment before the night is done. “Right.”

He leans over and douses the small gas lamp in the center of the table, plunging the two of them into darkness. Then, together but with six inches of space between them, they leave the Musain, closing the door firmly behind.

 

* * *

 

Grantaire’s apartment is fourteen blocks away, on the far side of the quartier. Beyond that, it’s pathetic. A single room, more a studio than a home, its scuffed wooden floors are splattered with paint stains like the remnants of some great carnage. The window was broken months ago—Grantaire, drunk at the time, doesn’t remember exactly how—and a simple wooden board now closes the hole, cutting Grantaire’s precious natural light by a third. It’s not ideal, but it’s the best he can afford.

It surprised him, back at the Musain, the businesslike way Enjolras went about all this. It isn’t that the young revolutionary doesn’t understand romance. Like any self-respecting Jacobin, Enjolras knows the pull of a good story, the way to manipulate words and mood and movement to bring another person under your spell. Grantaire has seen him do it, night after night, for a year. It’s only that, for Enjolras, romance is for the pulpit. Pragmatism belongs in the bedroom.

Grantaire isn’t complaining. He'll take Enjolras any way he can have him, to whatever extent he can manage it. It’s already so much more than what he deserves. A dream that can’t possibly be real.

They close the door first, lock it, pull Grantaire’s ratty curtains over the glass.

Then, slowly, Enjolras turns to look at him. That faint smile at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smirk, but not quite not, either. He seems to glow in the dim room, his golden hair catching the moonlight around the cracks of the curtains.

“Well?” he says, his voice soft with irony.

“All right?” Grantaire asks. His voice feels rough against the back of his throat, choking almost like a laugh.

Enjolras shrugs, opens one arm graciously, and says “Perfectly.”

Grantaire doesn’t need more permission than that. He pulls Enjolras to him by the front of his waistcoat, pressing a hungry kiss to his lips. Enjolras stumbles back, allowing Grantaire to push his slender back against the door, and to the devil with the handle digging into his spine. Enjolras’ movements seem tentative, almost self-conscious, and his kiss is soft and simple. He kisses as though he's never been kissed before.

Grantaire pulls back, momentarily startled. That can’t be possible. Can it?

“Have you done this before, Apollo?” he asks.

Enjolras shakes his head, almost testily, as though he can’t fathom why this matters. “No,” he says.

“I’ll be gentle,” Grantaire says, but Enjolras rolls his eyes.

“I don’t want you to,” he says.

Grantaire swears a thousand silent damnations to God. It’s cruel, at this point. The Lord declared Grantaire’s desires a sin, then in the same breath He created someone as beautiful as Enjolras, a man who has looked Grantaire in the eye and said _I don’t want you to be gentle._ If Grantaire is going to hell—and he is, he’s quite sure on that score—at least he’ll make it worth his while.

“Tell me if you want to stop,” Grantaire murmurs.

“I will,” Enjolras says.

If this is to be Enjolras’ first time, it’s Grantaire’s sacred duty to make sure he enjoys it.

He kisses Enjolras fiercely, letting his hands and his lips roam. Grantaire’s own pleasure has become immaterial. It doesn’t matter that Enjolras is inexperienced. Grantaire gets everything he needs from the shudder that ripples through Enjolras as Grantaire’s lips whisper across his neck. Grantaire grins, sensing the sensitive spot, and turns the whisper into a long, hungry caress, a kiss and then a suck and then a bite. Enjolras gasps when Grantaire’s teeth nip his throat. In any other man, that gasp would have been a moan.

Enjolras lets Grantaire take the lead. Submits to his touch, lets Grantaire strip him of his waistcoat and shirt, accedes to Grantaire’s more experienced pace. Still, there is an air of deference to his movements. It’s as if the power is still his, even now—to lend, but never to surrender. It’s unsettling and perfect and celestial, the way loving a god would be.

Grantaire tries to let the moment linger, but he aches too badly with wanting it, and soon he has pulled Enjolras to the bed, and from there it all seems to go so fast he can hardly follow it. He forces himself to slow—he will not hurt Enjolras, no matter what the man says, he could never do that—but even so, it doesn’t take long. Pleasure shakes him to the foundation of his being, and he hears himself cry out shamelessly, hears Enjolras’ soft, subdued gasp, and then they collapse back into bed, breathing hard, and it’s over.

They lie there briefly, before Enjolras lets out a soft breath and sits up. How he manages to find the energy so soon after, Grantaire will never understand. Empty in mind and body, he could go on lying there forever. But Enjolras has already stood up, reaches for his underclothes and trousers, begins to dress in the sliver of moonlight slipping through the curtains.

Grantaire leans back onto his forearms, still stretched across the bed, and regards Enjolras like a reverse sphinx. “You did _like_ it?” he asks.

Enjolras stands with his back to him, pulling on his trousers. It almost makes Grantaire laugh, that modesty. A bit late, all things considered.

“Of course,” Enjolras says. “You’re very good.”

That wasn’t why he asked, to hear Enjolras sing his praises, but Grantaire is not remotely complaining. “You could stay, if you wanted,” he says, looking up at the ceiling.

“Am I meant to?”

“Usually, that’s the done thing. If it was good.”

“I have work to do,” Enjolras says. Dressed to the waist now, he turns back, picking up his shirt where it fell beside the bed.

Grantaire watches his elegant fingers navigate the buttons, slowly hiding the toned muscles of his chest beneath the smooth linen fabric.

“It’s two in the morning,” Grantaire says.

“As I said.”

“You should sleep,” Grantaire says, and sits up. He swings his legs over the side of the bed and runs both hands across his face, wiping away the sweat and forcing himself awake. “You try to plan a revolution at two in the morning, you’ll end up guillotining the wrong side.”

“Grantaire, I don’t know any other ways of saying that I—”

“Have work. I know.” Grantaire sighs. “God forbid you take your eye off the sacred goddess of revolution for an evening.”

Enjolras tugs on his waistcoat and fixes Grantaire with a severe look. “Jesus Christ, Grantaire.”

Grantaire smirks. “Religion was the first thing to go in ‘89, Robespierre,” he says.

“Second was heads,” Enjolras says drily.

“Now don’t you get ideas, Apollo.”

“I have a name.”

Of course. But Grantaire has never once felt as if he has permission to use it.

“Will you ever tell the others about this?” Grantaire asks.

Not that he has any right to expect this of Enjolras. What he has already been given, it’s so much more than he deserves. Asking Enjolras to debase himself and admit to this in public is selfish, is cruel, is unreasonable, and he knows it. But still warm from his earlier rush of pleasure, he can’t think straight enough to stop himself from asking.

“There is no _this_ ,” Enjolras says, and puts one arm through his jacket. He is gone before the second arm has followed.

 

* * *

 

The next evening, at the Musain, Grantaire arrives early. Enjolras is already there, sitting at the table in the corner, reading a book of Alexis de Tocqueville with the end of his pen between his teeth. He glances up as Grantaire enters, nods, and turns immediately back to the book.

Grantaire feels his nerve waver. Shame flushes hot— _he regrets it, and why wouldn’t he, look at him, and then look at you_ —but he steels himself and sits. Enjolras was the one who asked. He encouraged Grantaire’s eager caresses, or at least permitted them, not twenty-four hours before. If nothing else, Grantaire deserves eye contact.

“I hoped we might talk,” Grantaire says.

Enjolras marks his page, then closes the book and regards Grantaire with the impenetrable severity of the Delphic oracle. “All right,” he says. “Tonight, I’ve invited two members of the Royalist Society to join us. Thought it would benefit us to hear what the enemy is saying. I’ve asked Ferre to debate the first. Do you think it best if Feuilly or Bahorel takes the other?”

Grantaire blinks. It is as if nothing at all has happened between them. As if Enjolras lacks object permanence, and their coupling the night before ceased to exist the moment it vanished from view.

“Debate them both yourself, Demosthenes,” he says, more bitterly than he intended.

Enjolras frowns. “You wanted to talk,” he says. “We’re talking.”

“Apollo, for God’s sake.”

Enjolras sighs, then stands and places one hand on Grantaire’s shoulder. Grantaire’s anger vanishes in an instant. He would sell his own soul for that touch. And Enjolras, damn his soul, knows it.

“I have work to do,” Enjolras says. “If you want to help me, help. Otherwise—”

“What do you need?” Grantaire asks instantly.

It isn’t until that moment that he senses how truly lost he is.


	3. Athena

_June 1831_

Enjolras is learning. And Grantaire has noticed.

How far they've come, since that first awkward, hesitant time. Then, it was like kissing a statue. Now, Grantaire cannot wait for Thursday nights to come round again, the night when les Amis meet at the Musain. Some nights, Enjolras will linger afterward. Others, Grantaire will leave the café alone.

They continue to meet in Grantaire’s flat, which is exactly as pathetic as it was a year ago. Enjolras, Grantaire knows, lives half a block from the Musain, in a three-room apartment with a bay window, but Grantaire has never seen the inside of it. It has never been suggested that they meet there. Grantaire suspects this is because if they met at Enjolras’ apartment, Enjolras would have no way to leave him.

No reasonable person could call Enjolras affectionate. But he’s not cold, either, not anymore. His tolerance for intimacy has spread at the edges, inched itself wider, wide enough for Grantaire to find a handhold.

Grantaire locks the door behind them, and Enjolras nests a hand in Grantaire’s hair. It has grown too long over the past year, but Grantaire can’t bear to cut it, not when it feels so heavenly to have Enjolras toy with it this way. Enjolras’ narrow hips press hard against Grantaire’s thigh, straining for the pressure, and Grantaire laughs and nips a kiss against Enjolras’ neck, enjoying the way his breath roughens with each graze of Grantaire’s teeth. Enjolras hums into the caress, encouraging him.

Grantaire’s fingers tug away Enjolras’ shirt, tossing it to the floor. Enjolras’ breath is faster now, and he slides with impossible grace out of his trousers. Grantaire is left to scramble out of his own clothes, suddenly falling behind in the pace. It still feels impossible, every time, that Enjolras allows this. That Grantaire’s paint-stained fingers are allowed to caress Enjolras’ taut belly, his lean thighs, the smooth curve of his ass. He has never been able to lose it, this worshipping way of touching Enjolras, like a supplicant at an altar. There is a holy mystery to it, one he knows Enjolras dislikes, but one he can’t help.

Enjolras groans against Grantaire’s lips, willing him to go faster. It is as if all Enjolras’ fury, his urgency, his reckless determination has spilled into their fast, desperate, hungry, anarchic coupling, fast careening toward revolution or defeat.

Grantaire, as always, fights to let the moment linger.

Grantaire, as always, is not successful.

He comes hard and faster than he wants to. Panting, glowing, he takes Enjolras in one hand and helps him to finish.

They lie there in bed for a moment, not speaking, letting their hearts slow. Then—like clockwork—Enjolras sighs, pushes a hand through his hair, sits up.

“Do you think this is a mistake?” Grantaire asks.

He has blurted out the question before he meant to ask it. It’s not fair, putting Enjolras on the spot like this— _are you ashamed of me, do you regret this_ —but it’s too late now to walk the question back. And besides, it has had the desired effect. Enjolras stops mid-movement, then lets out a long breath and falls back into bed. He stares up at the ceiling for a moment in silence. 

“Do you have a cigarette?” Enjolras asks at last.

“You don’t smoke.”

“No. And I don’t fuck men either. Do you have a cigarette?”

Trying not to show how the words sting, Grantaire pulls a battered metal case from the pocket of his jacket, now crumpled on the floor. From it, he takes a hand-rolled cigarette and passes it to Enjolras, who takes it with a smile. Trapping it between his lips, Enjolras lights it against the candle softly burning on the end table. He sits up, holding one lean leg to his chest, and takes a long drag. The smoke spills lazily around him. Grantaire watches with a throb of longing somewhere in his chest. He has never been so jealous of a cigarette, of a wisp of smoke spilling from a man’s mouth.

“I think everything I’ve done might be a mistake,” Enjolras says.

Grantaire stares. “You?” he repeats. “Christ, Apollo. You’ve never doubted yourself for six minutes total in your entire life.”

Enjolras shakes his head. “I don’t know,” he says. “Something you said—”

“I said?”

He sighs, then pulls in another breath of smoke. “Why does anyone die, you asked? For justice, or—”

“Or just to be remembered,” Grantaire finishes softly. It was an idle remark, a cruel jab interrupting one of Enjolras’ more furious rants three weeks ago at the Musain. He didn’t mean it seriously. It was a cruel way of seizing Enjolras’ attention, of forcing him to look away from his speech and _see_ Grantaire for once. It didn’t work. He didn’t think Enjolras even heard him. “I didn’t mean…”

“No,” Enjolras says, “you were right. I should have thought about that before.”

It revolts Grantaire, somehow, this doubt. He has long known that Enjolras is mortal—made of flesh and bone and fear. But it is one thing to know that, another to see it.

If Enjolras must be mortal, Grantaire will see to it that this half-god feels the best life has to offer.

He lets his hand caress Enjolras’ bare chest, circling a thumb around the ridge of his nipple. “For once,” he purrs, “stop thinking. For one night.”

“Fuck, R,” Enjolras breathes, as Grantaire’s thumb is replaced by his tongue.

Grantaire smirks, sensing Enjolras’ entire body tense. “Your wish is my command, Apollo,” he says, his voice low and his lips almost against Enjolras’ belly.

Enjolras stubs out the cigarette against the bedpost and guides Grantaire’s lips up to his. His mouth tastes of cigarettes and nothing else. Grantaire suspects Enjolras has not eaten since the last time Combeferre reminded him to do it.

The kiss lingers, but in it Grantaire feels another goodbye. He is nothing to Enjolras. Someone to fuck. Someone to distract him. Someone to leave quickly as soon as it is over, without quite making eye contact, without ever becoming anything more than this. Grantaire wants to pin Enjolras to the mattress. Grantaire wants to bind this Prometheus to the bed and keep him there, just for one night, as if this were a curse that sunrise would break. He wants to weep and beg Enjolras to stay, prostrate himself like the pathetic disaster he is.

Enjolras smiles faintly before kissing Grantaire’s forehead and sitting up.

“I have a meeting with four members of the Assemblée Nationale in the morning,” he says, instead of _I love you_ , instead of _I’m leaving you, again._

“How did you manage that?” Grantaire asks.

Enjolras’ smile drifts toward the mysterious, and then Grantaire knows how he managed that, this avenging angel with his god’s good looks and his prophet’s voice, no one can say no to him for anything.

“I’ll report to the Amis,” Enjolras says as he dresses. “When it’s over.”

“Good,” Grantaire says dully.

Enjolras pauses, having done the final button of his waistcoat. “You seem quiet,” he says.

It shocks Grantaire, frankly, that he has noticed.

“Are you ever going to tell them?” Grantaire asks.

Enjolras shakes his head. He intends it as exasperation, not a response, but Grantaire knows it stands in for both.

“I’ve given them everything,” Enjolras says. “I’m allowed one secret, aren’t I?”

Les Amis would love their leader more, Grantaire knows, if he told them. If they ever saw the mask slip. If they ever knew Enjolras as Grantaire has seen him tonight, lazy and sleepy, hair a wreck, thoughtfully smoking a cigarette, blankets tangled round his hips. As alive as anyone else.

Enjolras calls the others Les Amis, but more than once, Grantaire has wondered if Enjolras even knows what the word means.

“They wouldn’t judge you for it,” Grantaire says, though he knows he’s already lost this argument that isn’t an argument. “Ferre, Courfeyrac, the rest. You know they wouldn’t.”

“What you mean is,” Enjolras says, and leans against the doorframe, “I shouldn’t judge myself. For whatever this is.”

They both know perfectly well what this is, but Grantaire has never been able to make him admit it. Grantaire had an argument, had a series of rhetorical points explaining why Enjolras’ fear of honesty is destroying them, but those blue eyes have fixed themselves upon him, and again Grantaire has lost his ability to speak.

“Before I go,” Enjolras says, with an artificially careless tone that indicates the subject is closed, and he is going, and there isn’t a damn thing Grantaire can say to change his mind. “I wanted to give you something.”

He turns away from the door, then reaches into the satchel he brought with him from the café and unearths something in one hand. With a faint smile at the corner of his mouth, he hands it to Grantaire. Grantaire takes it, disgusted to see his fingers trembling. It's a book, a slim volume, bound in blue leather. He turns it to the side, reading the title in gilt letters along the spine. _Du Contrat Social: ou, Principes du Droit Politique._

“Rousseau,” he says.

Enjolras nods. “You said you wanted something to believe in.”

The gift feels at once like a confession of love and a rejection. Enjolras has shared something of himself in this, something integral to the workings of his mind. It is the foundation of his logic, the source of his fervor. Rousseau, to Enjolras, is everything. It is not at all what Grantaire needs. I want to believe in you, Apollo, he thinks, willing Enjolras to hear him. No one else. No philosophers, no thinkers, no prophets. You.

“Thank you,” he says.

When Enjolras is gone, Grantaire takes a half-empty bottle of brandy from beneath the bed and opens the book. He drinks and reads until dawn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who's left feedback on this story! You make my day, you fill my soul, you water my crops.


	4. Achilles

_June 1832_

The night before the funeral of General Lamarque, Grantaire expects Enjolras to leave immediately. It's a pattern they've settled into without speaking, without Grantaire accepting it or Enjolras giving any indication he's seeking acceptance. But that summer, tension has been growing in Paris, thick as a cloud of flies. Revolution is brewing. The world itself seems unsettled. Patterns no longer hold, in a summer like this.

Grantaire has at last fixed the broken window in his flat. It opens now, thank God. He rolls over toward the side of the bed, grasping for the faint breeze that barely penetrates the room. It’s too hot for this to help much. From two floors below, sounds of nocturnal Paris drift into the flat. The rumble of voices from the street. Now and again a shriek of laughter, high and wild and probably drunk, from a nearby tavern. The heat seems to make the sounds travel farther and more clearly.

Grantaire sighs and turns over again. His legs are tangled in the sheets, his hair sweat-plastered to his forehead.

Enjolras has flopped back onto Grantaire’s bed, lying flat on his back with his arms and legs slightly splayed. His body has become no less wonderous with time. If Grantaire could view him from above, Enjolras would look like da Vinci’s Vitruvian man, the perfect specimen of humanity. Somehow, there’s not a drop of sweat on him. How his body manages, Grantaire isn’t certain. It’s as if Enjolras isn’t entirely human.

The sound of footsteps echoes through the open window. As if startled by the sound, Enjolras sits up. Instead of leaving the bed, he pulls his knees to his chest and pushes one hand back through his hair. He looks his most human when he does that.

Then Enjolras looks down. This man who lowers his eyes before no god but liberty, no king but revolution, he looks down. It’s as if the sea itself has bowed its head.

Grantaire thinks back to earlier that day, that afternoon at the Musain. Enjolras stood tall and untouchable before the swelling crowd. The frenzy rose, the city hummed. Tomorrow the barricades, tomorrow the streets, tomorrow blood, tomorrow life. But as Enjolras spoke, Grantaire thought he heard his voice break over the word _liberation_ , the hesitation nearly overshadowed by the roar of the crowd. The fear was brief, gone as soon as Grantaire thought he heard it. He has wondered ever since if it was his own unwillingness to die that he saw transferred into Enjolras’ eyes.

Because Enjolras does not fear.

Enjolras will never say the words _I’m afraid._

Enjolras will never say _I think we should give up now._

Enjolras will never say _I’m willing to die for this revolution, but that doesn’t mean I want to die, and God I want to live, I’m ashamed of my own damned frailty but my God, my God, I want to live._

Enjolras will never say this.

Instead, Enjolras looks down at his knees, and he lays a hand on Grantaire’s thigh, and he says, “May I stay tonight?”

Grantaire melts. “Of course.”

Enjolras smiles, soft and faint like a candle in the witching hour, and lays back again, Grantaire’s arm around his shoulder. It seems impossibly luxurious, more improbable even than their rapid lovemaking from ten minutes before. They have never been together like this, not for this long. Enjolras is warm against Grantaire’s arm. This has always surprised him, that Enjolras feels, at base, like any other man. He wants to kiss that golden hair, pull that warm body closer, but he does not move, aware already that this is more than he deserves. A sharp movement might startle the dream away.

“You don’t need to come, tomorrow,” Enjolras says, looking at the ceiling. “I know you don’t believe it.”

Grantaire doesn’t want to die, particularly. But it insults him, in a way he doesn’t care to interrogate, that Enjolras doesn’t want him to die either. It doesn’t feel like care for his life. Rather, it feels like Enjolras is unwilling to die beside someone so uninspired, so uninspiring.

“I believe,” Grantaire says, though he doesn’t say in what.

Enjolras nestles closer, leaning his head against Grantaire’s shoulder. Suddenly, death seems irrelevant.

“If we fail,” Enjolras says, apropos of nothing, “don’t let them capture me. Shoot me yourself, if you have to, but don’t let that happen.”

Grantaire’s anger is hard and fast and confusing. Enjolras flinches, and Grantaire realizes he has clenched the fist holding Enjolras’ shoulder. He takes a deep breath, forcing his grip to ease. But for God’s sake. To be asked such a thing.

To think Enjolras would have the nerve to ask something like that. A promise Grantaire can’t be expected to deny or to keep.

Enjolras is a selfish, cruel martyr, he thinks.

Enjolras is twenty-six, and far from home, and afraid, he thinks a moment later.

Neither of these thoughts in themselves are correct. Neither of them are false, either.

“We won’t fail,” Grantaire says. “You and I, we’ll best them together. Single-handed. Achilles and Patroclus at the walls of Troy.”

Enjolras snorts. It’s undignified, out of character, and agonizingly beautiful. “Revisit your Homer, my Patroclus. If that’s your idea of not failing.”

Grantaire cocks an eyebrow. He won’t allow himself to reveal how deeply that single pronoun, that _my,_ has startled him. “I was referring to myself as Achilles,” he jokes.

“Ah yes. You, the warrior.”

“Known across France for the godlike thrust of my longsword,” Grantaire says, nudging Enjolras with his hip.

Enjolras laughs, a clear ringing laugh this time. Grantaire loves himself for the space of a moment, listening to that laugh.

“Don’t tell them,” Enjolras says softly, a moment later.

_That I’m afraid,_ he doesn’t say. _That I doubt. About this. About us. Don’t tell them that._

Grantaire indulges the impulse that has whispered at him for minutes, hours, years, four years at least. He may not get another chance. He kisses Enjolras’ forehead, then his lips, tenderly.

“Not a word,” he says.

Enjolras sighs. When he falls asleep against Grantaire’s shoulder, a few minutes later, it occurs to Grantaire that this is the first time he’s ever seen Enjolras sleeping.

It’s the happiest he has ever been. He could die in this moment, and would regret nothing.

“I love you, Apollo,” he says to the darkened room.

Enjolras, asleep, says nothing.

 

* * *

 

Later, when he sees the barrels of the National Guard’s rifles turned on Enjolras across the top room of the wineshop, in the room where they met, at the table where they met, Grantaire will wonder if there is something punitive in it. God’s vengeance, for his daring to feel such complete and total happiness, a sensation he knows he hasn’t earned and doesn’t deserve.

Enjolras’ punishment for believing is to die.

Grantaire’s punishment for loving him is to watch.

But he has never been good at taking punishment quietly.

Rage fills him at the thought, and before he knows what he’s done, he has shouted something suicidal and stupid— _vive la revolution_ , he can’t even come up with original words to die with. He shoves through the line, standing shoulder to shoulder with Enjolras.

He expects the fear to come at any moment. Somehow it doesn’t. Either it will come at the last moment, or he’s already beyond that.

The rifles look more alarming from the other side. He gazes into their gaping barrels, the nine guns pointing at two men. Then he turns away from them, toward Enjolras.

Those blue eyes ignore the guns completely. They focus entirely on Grantaire. Enjolras’ expression is calm, carrying something that could almost be faint amusement. _This isn’t quite what I asked of you,_ those eyes seem to say.

_I never do what I’m asked,_ says Grantaire.

He prefers death this way, if it has to happen. Neither left to avenge the other, neither left to wonder what they should have done. Out with one stroke, just like that. Extinguished. Simple. Clean.

“Do you permit it?” he asks.

He reaches out a hand to his right. Enjolras takes it with his left, wordlessly. Grantaire is confident, now, perhaps for the first time, that Enjolras won’t leave him.

Four summers. It wasn’t nearly enough time. But it was all they had, and Grantaire wouldn’t trade it for anything. Not even though it brought him here, in the line of a row of guns, counting what he suspects will be his last half-dozen heartbeats.

The hammers of the rifles cock, all nine at once.

Enjolras’ palm is cool and dry, but Grantaire doesn’t think of marble.

He tightens his grip, and the guns fire.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for humoring me in this self-indulgent fic! Comments and kudos are dearly loved—let me know if you like it!


End file.
